Many surgical operations call for the precise and accurate cuts of bone material. Generally, these cuts, or resections, are made using surgical saws or milling devices. These instruments, while excellent at cutting the bone material, typically require cutting guides in surgical procedures calling for accurate cuts. For example, a surgeon performing a total knee arthroplasty must make several cuts on the distal end of the femur to properly fit a prosthetic femoral component. If these resections are incorrectly made, the surgery can result in failure and require further corrective procedures.
For this and other reasons, surgeons often employ the use of surgical cutting blocks, known also as cutting guides. These blocks aid in guiding the cutting device during the cutting of the bone material. A specific type of cutting block is one used to create four cuts on an already resected distal portion of the femur as part of a total knee replacement. These four cuts are the anterior and posterior cuts and the anterior and posterior chamfer cuts. Examples of these femoral cutting blocks are shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,454,816 to Ashby, U.S. Pat. No. 6,258,095 to Lombardo et al., and U.S. Pat. No. 6,558,391 to Axelson, Jr. et al.
While cutting blocks such as those described above are useful in performing the various cuts on a bone, they have their drawbacks. Most importantly, the manufacturing costs associated with such blocks are often quite high. A standard block is typically constructed of metallic material machined from a solid block or from several solid metal pieces and assembled to allow for the various cuts to be performed. The high costs require these expensive cutting blocks to be utilized in multiple surgeries. This re-use requires the cleaning and sterilization of such a block before each use, which adds additional cost. Furthermore, multiple uses of a cutting block allows for greater chance of misaligning a cutting tool, such as a flat oscillating saw blade, due to wear of the cutting guide surfaces. Hence, a disposable single use cutting block would be advantageous. Therefore, there is a need for a cutting block that can be inexpensively manufactured, while maintaining the required precise and accurate dimensions needed for making cuts.